Have you seen the YOLO Object detection videos on Youtube? If you have't, check it out. It’s really amazing stuff.

Now, Google has made it easier for you to develop and use similar models with the familiar Tensorflow machine learning framework. For this purpose, Google has released it’s Object Detection API which makes it easy to construct, train and deploy object detection models. Getting started with this is not too straight forward and is the reason for this guide. In this article you will learn how to install the Tensorflow Object Detection API in Windows.

Note- This tutorial is using the following: protoc-3.4.0-osx-x86_64.zip. If for some reason you cannot see the proto.exe file under the bin folder. Use this link instead to download protoc-3.4.0-win32.zip.

4 - Extract Google Protobuf

You will now extract protobuf into a location of your choosing. I extracted mine here: C:\Program Files\protoc-3.4.0-win64

You should see the following files:

Keep this location handy as it is needed in the next step.

5 - Generate Required Files

For the next step you need to open the command console and cd into the research folder of step #1. If you are using my paths you should see the below: